The Pro-Life Cause (as imagined by Peter Singer)

Peter Singer has weighed in on the scandal surrounding Korean scientist Woo-Suk Hwang's flawed stem cell research (HT: CT), arguing that the ethical implications of the research strike a mortal blow to the pro-life movement:

[T]he ethical significance of such research goes far beyond the undoubted importance of saving critically ill patients. Proving the possibility of cloning from the nucleus of an ordinary human cell would transform the debate about the value of potential human life, for we would find that potential human life was all around us, in every cell of our bodies.

For example, when President George W. Bush announced in 2001 that the US would not fund research into new stem-cell lines that are created from human embryos, he offered the following reason: Like a snowflake, each of these embryos is unique, with the unique genetic potential of an individual human being.

But it is precisely this reasoning that is threatened by what Hwang and his team claimed to have achieved. If it is the uniqueness of human embryos that makes it wrong to destroy them, then there is no compelling reason not to take one cell from an embryo and destroy the remainder of it to obtain stem cells, for the embryo's unique genetic potential would be preserved.

This possibility highlights the weakness of the argument that abortion, too, is wrong because it destroys a genetically unique human being. By this reasoning, a woman who finds herself pregnant at an inconvenient time could have an abortion, as long as she preserves a single cell from the fetus to ensure that its unique genetic potential is preserved.

Maybe I'm not privy to the conversations where these arguments are being made, but the thrust of the pro-life argument as I understand it is not that fetuses should be protected because they are genetically unique, but because they are human beings.  (On this front, of course, Singer retreats to his longstanding claim that human life is valuable not as human life but only to the extent that it exhibits certain functions -- functions conveniently not exhibited by embryos, fetuses, or even infants.)

Rob